This site, named Mindworkers, is witness to my central belief that teachers think for a living, and ought to be organized as professional workers with expansive rights and responsibilities rather than industrial workers. This theme is most completely developed in United Mind Workers: Unions and Teaching in the Knowledge Society. Although it was published by Jossey-Bass in 1997, most of the ideas in the book are still current and the ...[Read Now]

It has been nearly a decade since Learning from L.A. was published by Harvard Education Press. In many ways, it is among the best work I have done in my academic career. In some other ways, it is a disappointing, blowing-into-the-wind book because the underlying message has not been received or acted upon. The politics of education—like politics in most of the rest of the country—is polarized, and the parties ...[Read Now]

Teacher run schools fascinate me as a special case of producer’s cooperatives. They are experiments in self-organization, alternatives to traditional hierarchies, expansion of traditional teacher roles, and over time the re-creation of role specialization. The first piece in this series is a case study of Avalon School in St. Paul, MN and schools in Milwaukee. It was written in 2010 and is available in pdf form here, and appendix here. The ...[Read Now]

Author: Charles Taylor Kerchner - High Tech High may be the only school in the country that has an Emperor. Rob Riordan took the tongue-and-cheek title of “emperor of rigor” partly to address the expectations of visitors looking for someone in authority and partly as a serious joke, a conversation starter about how HTH views student achievement. It’s not about test scores. From the start, one is led to expect ...[Read Now]

In January 2012, I posted The Politics of Learning 2.0: From Governance to Capacity Building and offered thanks and acknowledgement to the Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation for their financial support of the research leading up to it. This report is the last of the pieces planned as part of the project. However, there are more recent blog posts, and readers are invited to explore them in the blog space and archives. The ...[Read Now]

Authors: Laura Steen Mulfinger and Charles Taylor Kerchner - The California Virtual Academy (CAVA) joins similar schools in other states as a growing presence in public education. This case study examines the operations and structure of CAVA and its corporate parent, K-12. The full case is available by clicking here ...[Read Now]

Disrupting Class is a most provocative book, in part for its bold prediction that by the end of the decade half of high school classes will be taught with via computers and smart software. If the authors are even half right, the change will be sweeping. But the book should not be read as a text about technology; it is about institutional change and the end of the batch-processing mode of ...[Read Now]

Author: Charles Taylor Kerchner - Two forces will fundamentally change public education and deeply challenge the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. I will describe them, and then, I will pull the long-legged beasties out from under the bed, and try to show that they can, indeed, be your friends. Both these forces involve networks. Computer networks that can teach or at least supply much of smartware ...[Read Now]

The sound you hear is the lid being pried off Pandora’s Box. Jason Song’s Los Angeles Times investigation of efforts to dismiss teachers in California makes public what practicing educators have known for decades: that it is almost impossible to fire a tenured public school faculty member for teaching badly. Song’s articles are the most viewed on the Times web site in the past week; they induced more than 1,200 comments from readers. The second installment about ...[Read Now]

It was easier to find assertions about the connections between teacher unionism and student achievements than find credible evidence. Major studies found both positive and negative effects, and there is considerable methodological debate about methods used. In general, the effect size is not great and often the quality of the data do not warrant the sweeping generalizations made about the research conclusions. There is also a considerable body of research ...[Read Now]

United Mind Workers was published by Jossey-Bass in 2008 and is still available at Amazon and other booksellers. CHAPTER ONE Organizing the Other Half of Teaching Book ideas are born in odd places. After a gestation period that would frustrate an elephant, this one revealed its true form in an elevator. A National Education Association organizer approached Charles Kerchner, saying, "These changes you're talking about-it's not just reforming the union ...[Read Now]

In this article published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, (Summer 2007) 30:3, Martin Malin and I examine the legal tradition that supports the industrial definition of teaching work in light of the avowed intent of charter school legislation to crate high performance/high involvement work places. The article concludes that embedding methods of worker representation in the charter itself, instead of in labor law, provides the best mechanism ...[Read Now]

Despite a statutorily narrow scope of bargaining, the scope of topics of union-management discussions has widened over the last 20 years, resulting in the birth of reform, or professional, unionism. But over the last half decade, professional unionism has waned. School management often refuses to see unions as partners, politicians fail to view unions as legitimately speaking for education change, and unions themselves are reluctant to assume added responsibility. In ...[Read Now]

A personal essay about growing up Presbyterian in Indiana in the 1950s. Originally written in the late 199s and revised in 2005. I have a memory, recessed deeply in boyhood, of a towhead furiously peddling a balloon-tired single speed bicycle pretending it was a Corvette…peddling toward Tabernacle Presbyterian Church. Indianapolis in the ‘50s was just down the sociological and chronological road from the Middletown of 1927.[1] When later I read ...[Read Now]

In A Union of Professionals, Julia Koppich and I show how teaching could be organized around professional rather than industrial principles. The book was published in 1993 by Teacher's College Press. It is out of print, but copies are available on Amazon, and I have a few mint-condition copies. The following summary is not taken directly from the text: Teacher unions, which are frequently viewed as part of the problem with ...[Read Now]